SystemC-based power simulation of wireless sensor networks

Networks consisting of many autonomous sensors are gaining importance. Most wireless sensors have small batteries and must therefore be designed to consume very little power. In this paper, an approach for whole-system simulation for ultra-low power wireless sensor networks is proposed. To be able to estimate the power consumption of the whole network, the simulation framework must not only simulate the sensor nodes themselves, but also the overall system consisting of sensor nodes and other elements which can be much more sophisticated. It therefore includes an instruction set simulator for better accuracy. To speed up the simulation transaction level modeling (TLM) is used, with SystemC as the base for the simulation framework.